


to give back tomorrow

by endquestionmark



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-13 08:48:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9115738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: Jack takes up space. Far too easily, and he always looks far too happy about it.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starstrung](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung/gifts).



Jack takes up space. Far too easily, and he always looks far too happy about it; even in the limitless sprawl of the TARDIS he seems to find a way to occupy every room somehow. Coat thrown over the console, yesterday’s shirt hung from the hatrack, a certain quality to the light: “Stop that,” the Doctor says, offhand. “You just encourage him.”

The light shifts — less amber, more yellow daylight — and he goes with it. At the top of the control room, unguarded by coral and draped in cables, the rotor expands into a series of flanges, a distribution and grounding system which the Doctor tries to think about as infrequently as possible. Multidimensional thought gives him a headache when the number of axes involved enters the double digits. Fortunately, he doesn’t need to consider the finer points of Cenva theory to do routine maintenance work. All he needs for that is a good head for heights and the willingness to get his hands dirty.

The pillars in the console room are easy enough to climb with a wrench between his teeth and climbing gear looped over his shoulders, and the Doctor finds the work soothing, even sitting in a makeshift sling clipped to the ceiling. Genius is no substitute for regular upkeep, and he enjoys sitting in companionable silence with his best girl, listening to the hum of engines and falling into a meditative lull as the light shifts to brighten where he needs it most.

“Just like old days,” he murmurs, although it isn’t at all; the first time he tried to do more than set approximate coordinates — still very young and new and small in a great wide universe, still unsure of where and when to go and who to be — he had seared off his own fingerprints for a week. She had been new then too, of course, untested and bored and in search of adventure. No wonder they had suited each other so well.

They still do, have grown to suit each other even more, and these days the Doctor knows when to attempt repairs of his own and when to leave well enough alone. This he can do: check the seals, clean the overflow gaskets, make sure the coral is structurally sound and reconfigure the valves to redistribute stress if it isn’t, easy and natural as listening to his own heartbeats.

He drifts away a little, soothed by the repetitive nature of the work and its familiarity, and only comes back to himself when the light changes again. “What’s wrong?” he says. Below, the sound of footsteps, a meandering stride: “Are you _blushing?_ ”

Jack pauses in the doorway. “No,” he says to the room at large, before he looks up and catches sight of the Doctor. “Should I be?”

Standing in shirtsleeves and socks on the bare metal grating, he looks — the Doctor can’t put a finger on it, but it irritates him. For a hitchhiker, Jack seems to be going to great pains to ingratiate himself. Of everything the Doctor had expected — perpetual nudity, the installation of a revolving door, an endless series of provocations — the closest Jack has come is his apparent use of any horizontal surface as a coat rack. “There are fixtures for that, you know,” he says, jerking his head at the console.

Jack looks pointedly at the Doctor’s own coat, tossed through the crook of a column.

“Not like that,” the Doctor says; he gets to be messy because this place is his, where he belongs. He gets to treat it as his own because that sort of ownership goes both ways. If Jack presumed that sort of familiarity, it would set him even more on edge than Jack’s presence already does. “Surely there’s somewhere else you can put it.”

“Oh, sure,” Jack says. “Like that?” He waves at the cluttered seat, and the Doctor winces. “Or that.” He gestures at the rack by the door. The Doctor forces a smile. “Right. I didn’t think so either,” Jack says. “Seriously, if you want me to leave, you can just say. And drop me off somewhere with an atmosphere, this time.”

“You don’t need an atmosphere,” the Doctor says.

Jack crosses his arms. “Actually, you’re supposed to ask why I’d think that.”

The Doctor frowns. “What?”

Jack just looks at him for a minute. “Right,” he says, eventually. “Never mind. Of course you wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t what?” The Doctor sets the wrench back between his teeth and gives up, for the moment, on peace and quiet; he swings himself over to the nearest column and begins the awkward climb down.

“You don’t want me to leave my coat here,” Jack says, enunciating each word, “but you don’t actually want me to leave it anywhere else.” He nods at the Doctor’s habitual clutter: tea on the console, tangle of wires hanging loose underneath, seat almost invisible under a teetering pile of spare parts and abandoned projects. “You aren’t exactly a paragon of organization.”

It’s his mess, the Doctor wants to say, because it’s his space; Jack’s coat stands out. It sticks at the corner of his eye, an errant blot of anachronism and immutability, and reminds him of things he would rather forget. On a trading post in a far-flung orbit around the last cold embers of a neutron star, it had stood out immediately in a bazaar full of color and noise, and despite the sea of faces between them Jack had turned and the Doctor had thought _well, this is going to be trouble._ Not the sort that he liked, either, not the bombastic sort of trouble that meant imminent adventure and the possibility of a dramatic exit afterwards; the sort of trouble that stuck, and was impossible to get rid of — bad-penny trouble. Feet firmly on solid grating once more, he removes the wrench from his mouth and grimaces, working the tension from his jaw. “You _are,_ aren’t you,” he says, in lieu of an answer. “You’re making things very difficult, you know.”

“Excuse me?” Jack says, but the Doctor shakes his head and points at the ceiling. “Oh, _you,_ ” he says, and lays his hand on the nearest column.

“Stop it,” the Doctor says, half on reflex.

“What? We get on perfectly fine.” Jack leaves his hand there. The Doctor wants to lean away, although Jack is nowhere near him; he does his best to avoid looking, instead, but judging by the look on Jack’s face he isn’t doing a particularly good job. “Don’t we?”

They do. The Doctor doesn’t need to listen for a shift in the engine hum to know that: Jack is being a very good guest, as much as he can given the circumstances; the circumstances are the Doctor’s ill will and the fact of Jack’s stubbornly persistent immortality. For somebody who shouldn’t be alive, let alone standing in the console room and taking up the Doctor’s space, Jack is compelling. He has a wealth of stories to fill the space and silence, when the Doctor runs out of those he is willing to tell, and knows when to let it lay; he talks in the hallways, a narration of his own thoughts half addressed to himself and half to the TARDIS; he has an uncanny knack with leftovers of unknown provenance; he doesn’t impose. He simply takes up space, physical and otherwise, a peripheral presence that the Doctor just can’t quite shake. He doesn’t try to set destinations or cause trouble. He doesn’t turn the Doctor’s life on its head. He seems content to share space and time, and that irks the Doctor most of all.

“Stop that,” he says, again, and adds: “Not you.”

Jack raises his eyebrows. “Sure about that? You can probably find something to complain about if you try.”

The Doctor frowns at him, hanging the climbing gear on the last exposed corner of the seat and shoving the wrench under the rest of the mess. “If you’re going to be like that,” he says, aware as he does that it’s a nasty, petty thing to say. The problem is that being around Jack is like staring at the sun, knowing that it’ll leave him blinking and disoriented and doing it anyway; the problem is that being around Jack always ends the same way, no matter where or when, because the Doctor has never been able to resist the urge to look up, to get a little closer to the heart of an explosion, to chase the unknown a little too far every single time.

“Oh, go on,” Jack says. “Give it a try.”

“Stop sweet-talking my ship,” the Doctor says, and Jack traces a circle on the column with the pad of his thumb. He can hear the faint rasp of skin over coral, and the light shifts again. “Stop letting him sweet-talk you!” he adds, not looking away from Jack. “And stop that.”

Jack opens his mouth, shuts it, and lifts his hand from the column, looking unimpressed the whole while.

The Doctor crosses his arms and feels more petulant than ever. “Thank you,” he says. “Stop leaving your things everywhere. And stop being all—” Jack takes a step, and he backs away, half-turning so he has the console at his back: old instinct, to stay close to the heart of his ship at all times. “—just stop that,” he says.

Jack takes another step. “Stop what?”

“You _know_ what,” he says, and gestures. “That.”

“Going to need you to be a little more specific here,” Jack says.

One step, two, and the console room doesn’t have enough space for such theatrics. In another few steps, the Doctor knows, Jack will be close enough to — “Stop being so, oh,” the Doctor says, “why bother—“ and he closes the space between them. It always ends like this: Jack’s skin human-cool to the touch, even as his heartbeat picks up; the slow curve of his smile, as if every single time surprises him all over again; the lazy contradictory entitlement with which he touches the Doctor, gets him undressed and laid out over the console, unhurried and unhesitant. As if he knows this, though of course he does: every _single time_ , at least once a century so far, to say nothing of the travel time in between. “This is a terrible idea,” the Doctor says, not too much later, fidgeting away from the lever wedged under his shoulder blade.

“Try not to send us to the literal Dark Ages this time,” Jack says. “Can you manage that or should I look for the parking brake?” The Doctor does his best to convey with a look that if Jack stops, even for a moment, the Dark Ages will be the least of his worries. Jack laughs, but seems to get the message. “Didn’t think so,” he says. “Anyway, smartest man in the universe—“ He gets the Doctor’s leg hitched up a little higher, pats him on the thigh, fingers slippery, and hums under his breath. “—there. Smartest man in the universe and you keep saying that, and yet we keep ending up here.” Which isn’t fair, because he knows the Doctor can’t help but preen, and so when Jack pushes in — unrushed but unrelenting — it renders him useless for almost a minute. “And that isn’t exactly a case of you tripping and falling onto my—“

“All _right_ ,” the Doctor says. “You could stop being smug about this any time if you wanted, you know.”

Jack shrugs. The movement presses him a little closer, jostles the Doctor a little further up the console, all rather undignified. “That doesn’t sound very fun.” Jack shifts a little, hair falling over his forehead, changes the angle of his hips and looks at the Doctor for a reaction. Whatever he sees — not that the Doctor can tell, distracted as he is — must be good, because he grins. Not one of his million-watt charm offensive smiles, either, but something a little more unpracticed, a little more compelling, and more than a little self-satisfied. The Doctor can’t bring himself to care, not with all of Jack’s singleminded focus on him: vanity, probably, but he does find it awfully flattering to know that Jack wants him this badly, even if that doesn’t mean very much. The matter-of-fact praise doesn’t hurt, either.

“You should try it,” he says. “Might surprise yourself.”

“I rarely do.” Jack tilts his head and gives the Doctor’s hip a squeeze, takes his cock in hand and smears his thumb through the drips of precome at its head. “You, on the other hand?” He licks his thumb clean, and the Doctor makes a noise that he doesn’t want to think about, all possessive neediness. “Yeah,” Jack says, and takes him by the hip again. “You find new ways to surprise me all the time.”

The Doctor has no answer to that. Instead he tangles his fingers in Jack’s hair and pulls him back a little, so that he can watch Jack’s face. For his troubles, he gets a moment of glare, an _I know what you’re up to_ sort of look, before Jack gets back to work setting a rhythm. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the Doctor suspects that he’s being rude; somewhere further back than that, he suspects that Jack doesn’t mind, and that it might in fact be a good part of his appeal.

Jack — fixed-point Jack, too bright and too real to look at for more than a few minutes, willing to live through centuries on end for a hello and a cup of tea — never asks anything of him. He doesn’t ask for adventure, which the Doctor knows he could very well find on his own if he wanted, and he doesn’t ask for help digging up the lost years of his life. Even the Doctor might have difficulty saying no to that, but Jack simply never asks. He just waits, and follows, and when he manages to catch up for a minute he leaves his coat on the console and makes the TARDIS blush and otherwise simply is, seems content to simply wander the halls listening to the hum of the engines and watching the Doctor work.

The Doctor can’t say he doesn’t understand, but it makes him feel flighty and young all over again, hearts bursting with his first glimpse of foreign starlight. It scares him, to think someone could feel that way about anything less than all of time and space, but worst of all to think that someone could hold him equal to that. He knows he never could, wouldn’t give up traveling for anything, wouldn’t give up the endless expanse of the unknown for anyone, but he thinks that Jack might be willing to, and it makes him want to run. And yet they keep ending up here, accelerating rhythm of breath and movement, quantum entanglement on the most intimate level: each the only one of their kind, with too much shared history to ever drift apart.

“Anybody home?” Jack says, out of breath. “I’d be insulted if you weren’t, well, you.” The Doctor looks at him — flushed all the way down his chest, eyes bright, expression one of banked optimism, the look of a man unwilling to ask but hoping for a reply nevertheless — and thinks, _oh, what does it matter_. One of them will be gone soon enough anyway, off on one mad undertaking or another; when they meet again, inevitably, they will fall into the same patterns as always.

“Oh, come here, you,” he says, and tugs Jack up by his hair. Before Jack can come up with a retort, the Doctor kisses him, and Jack doesn’t stop moving — too far gone for that — but he does sigh, almost, a full-body release of tension. The Doctor digs his thumb into the hinge of Jack’s jaw then and grins when he jerks forward. “There you are,” he says. “Get on with it, then.”

“What a romantic,” Jack says, but some of the awful hope is gone from his face, replaced with a more familiar spark of competitiveness. Better for both of them if they don’t have time to think too much, to realize what this could — and could never — be; better to distract now and disappear later. Jack does get on with it, though, finds a rhythm that renders both of them breathless and the Doctor louder than usual, to his embarrassed enjoyment. When he comes, he clutches at Jack’s shoulders in abstract surprise, and Jack doesn’t look away or turn his face into the Doctor’s shoulder. He just watches, looking almost greedy, and collapses on top of the Doctor afterwards, heavy and lazy and ignoring all his half-hearted complaints.

The Doctor could push Jack away, if he wanted, make his escape to the library or the wardrobe or find some other odd job with which to busy himself and wait until Jack bored of the monotony. He could stop letting Jack find him; that wouldn’t be so hard. The universe, for all that it feels like a dwarf planet sometimes, is big enough that it might be a while before they ran into each other again. He could run, make a point of it this time, and see how long it took Jack to give up looking. The engine hum picks up a little, and the lights brighten. “All right,” he says aloud. “No need to be so obvious about it.”

Jack looks up. “Excuse me?”

“Not you,” the Doctor says.

“I should hope not,” Jack says, with some satisfaction. He presses a kiss to the Doctor’s shoulder, idly, and looks up through his lashes.

“All right, maybe you,” he says, just to see Jack laugh, because it’s easy and because he wants to and because it might be unfair of him, but the Doctor never claimed to be fair or nice or anything but himself, a little bit rude and a little bit selfish, and here Jack is anyway. “That’s a bit much.”

“You love it,” Jack says, back to banked optimism and lightness that seems like second nature but must cost him some effort.

The Doctor raises an eyebrow. “Do I?”

Jack shrugs. “Your ship does.”

“Yeah, well.” He pushes his hair out of his eyes. “She likes me, so that just goes to show.” Engine hum, shift of light again: “Oh, don’t start.”

“I think she’s got pretty good taste,” Jack says.

“You would,” the Doctor says, and she hums, his best girl, engines rumbling like the deep slow breathing of somebody about to fall asleep, lights shading through gold and green and blue.

“Yeah,” Jack says, voice soft, and lays one hand on the console by the Doctor’s face. He catches his breath. “You too.”

He talks to the TARDIS, and he takes up space, and he never asks, the Doctor thinks. It makes something in his chest feel misfitted, as if he should be able to say the same, but doesn’t quite know how.

“I suppose she’s not completely wrong,” the Doctor says, for lack of any other truth, and when Jack smiles — half-charmed and half-helpless and all utterly forthright — then, he can almost hear her singing.


End file.
